Monument to the German Resistance

On July 21, on a solo trip to the Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery), the home of Berlin's collection of paintings predating the 19th century, I made a stop at the courtyard where the chief conspirators in the plot to overthrow Hitler on July 20, 1944, were executed. It is now home to the German Resistance Memorial Center. I found there wreaths laid at the site the day before on the 60th anniversary of the event. The leader of the plot, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, had managed to get a briefcase full of explosives into a conference room where Hitler was meeting, and to escape before it exploded, thanks to a prearranged phone call that took him from the meeting. But Stauffenberg was apparently unable to fully prime the explosive ahead of time thanks in part to his war injuries (he had lost one hand and some fingers on the other), and the briefcase happened to be moved beneath a heavy table just before it went off. Stauffenberg, however, believed that he had succeeded, and he and his fellow conspirators went on to call on their fellow military men to overthrow the Nazi state. In the brief time before Hitler's survival became known there thus took place a sort of poll of the German elite, and even at this late date in the war Hitler retained enough loyalty to keep others from joining the coup. (This rather negative reading of the coup, by the way, I take from a British history of the war I read recently, not from what I've read on the website for the memorial itself.) The regime use the attempted coup as an occasion for a harsh crackdown on all surviving dissidents. Among those to be executed in the reponse to the plot were Dietrich Bonhöffer, the famous Luthern pastor and resistance figure. The war was already lost by the time of the plot (the allied invasion in France having succeeded), but several million people were yet to die and could have been saved had the coup worked.

As I was in a hurry (I was eager to spend some time without a three year old with the Old Master paintings), I didn't find time to explore the exhibits at the Resistance Center. I did happen to note, however, that the center when up far before the major memorials of the attrocities committed by the Nazi regime. In the first decades following the war, it was far easier to commemorate resistance to the Nazis, especially (in West Berlin) conservative resistance to the regime (left-wing resistance was accordingly played up in the east), than to make an attempt to come to terms with the holocaust. But now with the Jewish Museum and the new Holocaust Memorial, both rather more prominent than the earlier memorials to German resistance, this inbalance seems to have been rectified. The only conceivably obtrusive thing about the German Resistance Memorial Center are the numerous signs directing one to it--which is how I largely stumbled upon it in my circuitous route to the Gemäldegalerie. It is otherwise fairly out of the way. The plaque I chose to photograph is in the courtyard of the otherwise fairly nondescript Bendler block, home to Stauffenberg's office during the war. One walks into the courtyard and can well imagine the coup leaders being shot there: there is a bench sitting across from a statue memorializing Stauffenberg and his companions. But the building is also still in use for more mundane purposes. As I visited, groups of employees and of military personel (the area is still home to German military offices) came in and out of the cafe located at the rear of the courtyard, in about equal numbers with visitors to the memorial. I suppose it is no less appropriate that the Court of Honor (as it is officially known) be in somewhat banal surroundings than that the Holocaust memorial itself be made of commonplace concrete slabs. It was the Nazis, after all, who were so good at putting on grand spectacles.